The Wrong Track

The inability of the current coalition government to look past social symptoms to deal with causes is at best blinkered, at worst cruel.

At their conference yesterday ACT leader David Seymour said the number of health and disability beneficiaries had nearly doubled in the past 10 years to 96,852 and RNZ quotes him as saying “hundreds of thousands of people were using welfare to sleep their life away, while their neighbour went to work.”

In other words – if you are ill, especially if you are mentally ill, it’s your own fault.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Luxon is reported as admitting he did not know that there is no night shelter in Auckland for people sleeping rough . This followed revelations that Ministry of Social Development staff have performance targets to reduce emergency housing numbers.

In other words – if you don’t have a roof over your head it’s your own fault.

The latest Stats NZ Child Poverty Statistics estimate 180,000 of our children are living in homes with incomes below the poverty line with the majority of those kids living in material hardship.

In other words – it’s their parent’s fault for not working hard enough.

If Charles Dickens were alive today he would have much to write about, because it is as if the 20^th century Social Welfare revolution had never happened as Seymour and Luxon are promoting the very attitudes of the Victorian ME society that caused the miseries he raged about.